Design and Analysis of an Acrylic Front of a Novel Mechanical Highway Billboard

Billboards are an effective instrument of advertisement at areas with high traffic flow such as alongside highways. They provide information to drivers for food, fuel, lodging, attractions, etc. A novel mechanical billboard has been conceived recently which contains rolling tubes to alternate as many as twelve printed signs. It has the advantages of both flexibility and cost-effectiveness. A container is built to protect the mechanism from the weather elements. To allow the displayed messages to be visible, a transparent acrylic front is installed. Due to its mechanical properties, it is a challenging task in designing a functional acrylic front. A reinforcement is selected to counter the weak flexural rigidity of the front during winds. On the other hand, the reinforced acrylic front must maintain sufficient visibility. In this study, a couple of conceptual designs are presented followed by the computer-aided engineering analysis regarding the strength, deformation and durability of the front under static, dynamic and fluid-solid-interaction (FSI) settings. A commercial finite element (FE) code is employed for modeling and numerical analysis. A few design issues related to mechanism as well as the results from numerical analysis are presented.